Confronting the “All Talk, No Action” Dilemma in Urban Research and Analytics

Why are many (early-career) urban academics expressing frustration over the division between the values scholars espouse and how academic work contributes to the institutional changes it promotes? Building on the premise that “critique” (exposing wrongs) and “vision” (advocating for new, enlightened ways of acting) has remained a prominent strategy in urban studies, this commentary reflects on the limits of relying on “critique and vision” alone as a means of pushing for change. As our contexts are more nuanced than simply fault-finding and advocating for more political space, this text considers the capacity of urban scholarship to support different planning possibilities.